


I Must Go Down to the Seas Again.

by Craftnarok



Category: Black Sails
Genre: F/M, M/M, Mentions of canon character death, but a happy ending, from 2x10 through to post-Treasure Island, some thoughts on the fate of Silver's lost leg, vaguely angsty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-28
Updated: 2016-08-28
Packaged: 2018-08-11 11:56:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7891138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Craftnarok/pseuds/Craftnarok
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Silver wonders where his lost leg ended up and considers how his fate has become tied to the sea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Must Go Down to the Seas Again.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm really not sure what this is, other than not the thing I was supposed to be writing. I just got the idea for the first paragraph in my head and couldn't let it go. Hopefully it makes sense.

He wonders sometimes what happened to his foot. He’s never asked Howell, but he supposes it was dumped overboard somewhere around Charles Town. He wasn’t compos mentis enough at the time to be aware, but he knows that the men who died at the hands of Vane’s crew were sent to the depths in the waters between Carolina and Tortuga. Swaddled in their hammocks, their brothers stitching them in tight from toes to nose, they were commended to the deep for one long, last sleep. For a brief moment as he lay awake in the corner of Flint’s cabin, an image had sprung to mind of his leg sinking to the seabed, sent off with a prayer to become food for crabs, bound tight in canvas with a single sturdy stitch through his little toe, just to make sure it truly was bereft of life. The absurdity of the picture had brought hiccupping gulps of laughter bubbling up from his chest, and in Flint’s alarm he had momentarily forgotten that he was aggressively ignoring Silver, weighed down by the black pall of his grief and his rage over the half-truth he knew he had been offered. He had hurried to fetch Howell, most likely wondering whether Silver’s mind had finally cracked under the strain of his suffering. Silver had managed to get his laughter back under control before Flint returned, as well as the subsequent heaving and unwelcome sobs, and so he feigned sleep in the hope that he might be left in peace. He knew Howell probably didn’t buy his act - his breathing was far too deliberate and his eyelashes twitched against his overwarm skin - but he was good enough to go along with the pretence, looking for infection and telling Flint that it was best to just let him sleep.

Some months later, during one of many arguments, Silver had made the mistake of mentioning Mrs Barlow again. He had said, in not quite so many words, that he had some understanding of what Flint might be feeling; that they had both left pieces of themselves behind in Carolina. In hindsight, his mistake had been allowing himself to become riled by Flint’s insufferable martyrdom, and his refusal to see their commonalities. More specifically, his mistake had been allowing his mouth to suggest quite unfiltered that he had probably spent far longer leaning on his leg than Flint had spent leaning on Mrs Barlow and that it was rather easier to acquire new bedfellows than it was new limbs. He was fairly astonished that Flint hadn’t ground him into the decking with his fists right then and there. He might even have deserved it. He was certainly not more innocent than the unfortunate Mr Singleton had been. Flint had avoided exchanging a single word with him for four tense days after that, and Silver couldn’t bring himself to be anything other than relieved.

As he sat trapped below decks with the submerged corpse that had once been Muldoon, he had felt a sudden and intense certainty that the sea itself was like a dark and gaping maw, slavering and yawning insatiably towards him. It had had a taste already, swallowed one leg whole, and like a spectre from a nightmare it would forever be at his back, following and watching and waiting for the day when it could claim the rest of him too. He was neither a superstitious nor a religious man, but a part of him wondered whether such a reunion wasn’t how it ought to be. One foot was already in its grave; perhaps it was simply the nature of the universe that the rest of his as yet still living mortal coil be drawn inexorably towards it. Still, he would quite like to die in a warm bed of his own, with silver hair and two stiff knees and a full belly that had long since forgotten how the cramping pangs of hunger felt. If he was delivered to the waiting water after that then it ought to make no difference to him, but the dark embrace of the warm earth was somehow a more comforting prospect.

He had asked Flint once about his earring, during a brief moment of peace after their first victory against Rogers’ men. It was an old thing, Flint had said, rolling it between his fingers as though he had almost forgotten it was even there. From his first pass over the equator as a young sailor, and though unbecoming to an officer it had proven a useful adornment to reinstate upon his arrival in Nassau as Captain Flint. _‘Not a talisman to prevent drowning then?’_ Silver had enquired, for he knew some men wore them as such charms, but Flint had offered a rare and genuine laugh and replied, ‘ _I thought that was what I kept you around for.’_ The next morning Silver had pulled Madi aside and asked for her help, and though she had raised an eyebrow she had refrained from questioning him further. Flint had noticed the small silver hoop glinting in the firelight that evening, and emboldened by a rum or two and their newfound…whatever it was, he had reached out and pushed the curtain of curls behind his shoulder to take a closer look. _‘Worried about drowning?’_ he had said as his fingers brushed the warm metal, and Silver had replied that it was more to cover the costs of a funeral to ensure that he become food for the worms, rather than the crabs. _‘Does it make a difference?’_ Flint had asked. _‘It might,’_ was all Silver had said.

Dooley had a chicken tattooed on one foot and a pig on the other. Silver had noticed them one day on the beach when Dooley was shouting directions to men offloading supplies from the launches to be carried inland. He had his shoes off, trousers rolled up, and the surf was washing over his feet. _‘It’s always the chickens and pigs that make it ashore when a ship wrecks. That’s the thing to stop you drowning, not the earring,'_   he had said when Silver asked about them. Silver had pondered it briefly, but one could hardly knock ink into iron, and if anything would quicken his descent into the crushing black it was that damn boot. Some men had the pig on their left knee instead, Dooley had said with a considering tilt of his head, but Silver had caught the glance thrown his way by a nearby Howell that said that if he found out Silver had been needling pigment into that much abused leg then he would drown him with his own two hands. Besides, as Wayne informed him later, the same tattoos had hardly helped Muldoon. The sea took what it liked; the wants of men mattered little.  

Some years later he had met a man in a tavern who claimed that a skeleton could lie intact on the seabed for eternity, stripped of its flesh by the creatures of the deep. _‘Thousands upon thousands of them, down there,’_ he had said. _‘More men littering the floor of the sea than walk on the earth today. Had you gills you could walk from Cape Horn to Land’s End upon their bones and never touch the silt.’_ Silver had narrowed his eyes sceptically, but again he wondered what had become of his foot. Was it still in one piece, or were there miles now between each toe? Did the sea cast lots with his bones with the rush and swell of every tide? He wondered if it changed his fortune with each throw, or whether the path of his fate remained unchanged, laid out upon the seabed for the undivining fish to see. He felt that strange pull once again, an aching tug on his scarred skin that reminded him that a part of him had already been laid to rest, and that one day his soul would cast aside his other bones as well. To the wind, to the tide, or to the earth; he supposed it hardly mattered in the end.

Flint had drowned, the story went. In a manner, at least. Drowned his sorrows at the bottom of a bottle, or two dozen, or three score. Silver saw in his mind’s eye his captain, tired and grey-bearded, take a deep gasping breath before he submerged himself and waited for the peace oblivion might bring. He had seen him try something similar once before; had dragged him from beneath a foundering ship in clear blue waters, straining with the weight of lost hope and heavy sins, and kicked with two good feet towards the beckoning beach. Flint had called him a talisman that kept him afloat, along with many another name, but talismans didn’t usually have free will to make the choice to let go and save themselves. He didn’t regret it, fleeing the crushing waves and washing the salt from his skin, but not a day went by that he didn’t wonder if there could have been a way to save them both. When he heard the story of Savannah, he wondered what had become of Flint’s bones. They belonged to the sea, he thought. Flint was made of saltwater and fierce currents and king tides, and should he be buried in a pauper’s grave the sea might course its way inland to claim him from the earth. Besides, Savannah wasn’t so far from Charles Town. Perhaps their bones might meet again amongst the coral.

They called them ‘Long John’s earrings’, the rope lines strung across the Hispaniola to aid him as he traversed the deck. He had laughed when he first heard the name and touched the silver hoop that still adorned his ear; slightly tarnished these days, but imbued with too much memory to bear removing it now. If he closed his eyes and concentrated hard enough, he could imagine the warm calloused fingers tugging on his lobe were not his own; the echo of a touch dredged from the deep well of times long past. He remained an unsuperstitious man, but there was a great deal of hungry sea between Bristol and that island, and he was keen to keep his lungs free of suffocating brine. Who was to say that Long John’s earring was not the thing that had kept him afloat all these years? It wouldn’t do to tempt fate. And so the earrings stayed one and all, and old Barbeque remained unsunk.  

Washed up in a brand new port, pockets only a little heavier for all the trouble it had cost, he found unexpectedly that he was not the only scrap of Walrus driftwood cast onto that shore. The water had scrubbed Flint clean, right down to his bones, leaving only James in his stead to navigate the construction of an anonymous life, where once so much had hinged on his name. The waves had carried the ignominious obituary of a once infamous buccaneer to the coasts of the Old World and it had brought his tale to an end, and in his afterlife James had waited. Silver found that all of a sudden the gentle tug of the calling sea was gone, and he wondered whether perhaps it had never been to his lost limb that the water was trying to deliver him after all, but rather to this man made of brine and saltpetre and slivers of fire striker flint. In one final act of recompense, the wide Atlantic bore to him his patient queen to stand as counterbalance to his rediscovered James, and those three, whose fates had been so violently carved by the sea, picked up their oars and walked inland.


End file.
